Waves

Hi guys, I happened to discover this cool new keyboard shortcut in the new gmail interface. This shortcut will work only if you have enabled keyboard shortcuts.

After logging in, press the ‘J’ key just to make sure that keyboard shortcuts are working. Once done with that, press ‘.’ (dot) key. The “More Actions” combo box will now expand. Use the standard arrow keys to move among the list of labels and actions. To move out of the combo box, press Escape key.

Example Uses:

1. Use the ‘x’ key to select a few messages/conversations.
2. Press ‘.’ (dot) to expand the “More Actions” box.
3. Select a label and press ‘Enter’.
4. The label will now be applied to the selected conversations. 😀

That said, the “More Actions” drop down is not an actual combo box. It’s done using DIVs and CSS.

P.S.: To enable keyboard shortcuts, first login to gmail. Then click “Settings” at the top right corner of the window. Now click “Keyboard shortcuts on” and click on “Save Changes” button at the bottom.

Oh yes! Starting from around 2nd week of December, I will be cycling to work ;-). Most probably, I may be the first one in my office to go by cycle. But I do not know as of now. I’m pushing this to 3 weeks down the line for 2 reasons… 1) last day of month = salary day 😀 and 2) giving myself enough time to let this idea sink in.

So, after I start cycling to office & if things go as planned, I should be cycling around 25 – 26 kilometres … which I believe is pretty cool for starters. This is one of the biggest advantages of having an office within city limits. You can move between places with a breeze and at a max, 2 places are just 10km apart within the city. Hence, when I want to go out from office for something & when it requires me to get the bike, I will cycle to home, get the bike & whizzzzzzz off 🙂

Even from the health perspective, it will help. For the most part, it will prevent backpain and it will exercise your legs; which means, getting a pot belly is very very difficult.

What do you say?? Suggestions please…

Dear friends, I wish you all a very & safe deepavali.

May the festival of lights bring tremendous joy and pleasure to you and your family.

😀

Man! seriously I say… you have to be in T.Nagar to feel the pulse of shopping extravaganza that the area offers. There are about 4 fly-overs being built in the area meaning which, everything roaming around will have to share the small place called “road” which is full of dark slush, created by the few hours of rain today morning. But nothing seems to dampen the spirit of shopping :D. From smallest 1 month old baby to the oldest grannies, everybody is simply thrilled to shop in T.Nagar at this time of the year. There are ofcourse special traffic regulations around this area; but this time nothing much could be done to control the crowd!

Half of the crowd will be in Saravana Stores and other half will be roaming the other zillion shops, while a few others will try and dance in front of irate bus drivers who try to drive as fast as possible out of T.Nagar. So after a futile attempt to shop at Saravana Stores, we headed to RmKV to buy new clothes for Deepavali :D. We shopped at this place for about 3 hours. Just for the fear getting lost among the crowd, we brought all our clothes here he he he… and headed home.

My mom is an amazing cook. Within a few minutes after we reached home, she cooked a superb meal for us :D. It ended with vanilla ice-cream. What a way to spend the evening! I enjoyed every minute of it 🙂

Yep, that’s the name of the event, which is the first of it’s kind to happen for just 1 minute (60 seconds). That’s all. Nothing more, Nothing less. Participating in this event is damn easy. All you need to do is carry a camera and when the clock strikes 3:11 PM, click whatever you see. Then upload the pic here or to your favourite photo sharing service such flickr, zooomr etc. Don’t forget to tag your photo as “311PM”. That will help us to find the photo after you upload it.

This event will show Chennai as it exactly is for that 1 breathtaking moment. Snaps taken across the city will show what other people are doing at that instant. It’s a wonderful archive to maintain and look it up later. Even if all you have is just a mobile VGA camera, it’s time to participate & show the world how the world around you looked at 3:11 PM 😉

Read more here and here. Happy Clicking!

Yesterday, I configured apache 2.2.3, php 5.2 and mysql 5.0.18. Alright, I know that’s not a big deal. But here are a few things that you must do in order for them to work seamlessly.

httpd.conf:
Add the following 4 lines to httpd.conf so that php will work correctly.

• LoadModule php5_module /path/to/php/php5apache2_2.dll
• PHPIniDir /path/to/php.ini (E.g. PHPIniDir “C:/PHP”. Note that the the path doesn’t end with “/php.ini”).
• AddType application/x-httpd-php .php – This tells apache to handle PHP requests. If you want to add more extensions for php, E.g. say you want to process “.abc” files as PHP, then add “AddType application/x-httpd-php .abc”.
• Find this line in your httpd.conf “DirectoryIndex index.html” and replace it with “DirectoryIndex index.html index.php”.

php.ini:
Go to the folder where you installed PHP. Open php.ini in your favourite text editor and find the line that says extension_dir = “./”. Replace that line with extension_dir = “/path/to/ext/folder”. Note that, there should be no trailing slash to the value of extension_dir.

my.ini:
Now go to the folder where you installed MySql. Try to start the MySQL daemon. I’m assuming that you haven’t installed MySQL as a service. If the mysql daemon (mysqld.exe) is running, try connecting to it by issuing the command on the command prompt.

“mysql -u <user_name>”

If you get an error like this “ERROR 2003 (HY000): Can’t connect to MySQL server on ‘localhost’ (10061)”, open your my.ini file. Find the line that says “port=3306”. Replace it with a port number of your choice. There will be 2 such lines in my.ini. One is for server and the other is for client. Now try connecting again.

To run the mysql server in verbose mode, instead of just double clicking on mysqld.exe, open command prompt and type “mysqld –console“. This will give you a quick overview of what is happening.

When you run your php scripts that connects to mysql, you should now specify the port number also (if it is not 3306). E.g. $con = mysql_connect(“localhost:4000“, “user”, “password”);

After all these changes, don’t forget to restart your apache server. When you get an error dialog that says that some PHP extensions cannot be loaded, make a note of those extension names first. Now, open your php.ini. Search for “extension=php_”. Above the first extension line, add the missing extension DLLs. E.g. extension=php_pdo.dll etc.

These are some of the gotchas that I faced 🙂 Next I have to try and configure a Mongrel cluster for apache for running ruby on rails apps.

My dear friends, I’m shifting my blog to wordpress. The blog may be unavailable for a day or two since I’m experimenting a few things. The experiments will definitely be updated on my tech blog.

Just to assure you, my non-tech blog URL (http://blog.aswinanand.com) and its feed URL (http://blog.aswinanand.com/atom.xml) will continue to work as they were :-). Thanks to the magic of mod_rewrite. The same goes with my tech blog also. The existing links http://tech.aswinanand.com and http://tech.aswinanand.com/atom.xml (for feeds) will work as well. That saves you from updating your feed links ;-). In a day or two, I will be updating my feed burner feeds as well.

Shifting my blog to wordpress, writing a wordpress plugin, wildcard domains, htaccess and mod_rewrite… whoa! All that was such a nice learning experience. Will be posting all that over some time on my tech blog.

Thanks a lot to all my readers 🙂

Update: The shift has been completed. The old non-tech blog is at http://aswinanand.blogspot.com/ and the old tech blog is at http://techlight.blogspot.com/.

So, you are out shopping in the busy Tnagar area in Chennai and you don’t find a place to park. After struggling for half hour, you come to terms with a small place with enough place only for a rat to sneak in. Somehow managing the difficulty, you park your brand new Bajaj Pulsar 200 cc bike and set off happilly for shopping.

Now, when you return your bike is lost! How come? You start wondering, start crying and even roll on the road. But the bike won’t come back. Here’s why.

Just a few days back, I went to the mechanic shop to repair my bike horns because they were not functioning properly. The guy who repaired was small… say may be 14 years old. He challenged me by saying that he could kick-start my bike without the keys! Man.. I was shocked. After meddling with something below the handlebar, he told me to remove the keys from bike. May be offered a small prayer or something but as soon as he kicked on the starter, the bike came to life. He was beaming, all this 32 teeth showing. He went for a small round and came back!

Now you know how many (if not all) bikes get stolen. Never ever forgot to side-lock your bike. If at all your bike was side-locked, even though starting it is not a problem, riding it IS definitely a problem.

Get it? 🙂

Hi guys, it’s been a long time since I made a post on the blog. I will be back in full swing soon.

But before that, a small news 🙂 I have been writing a few articles on http://thoughts.clubecho.org/. Please do read them and comment on them.

Hi guys, wordpress 2.2.2 has a problem of importing blogger blogs to wordpress. It happens when you get an error saying, “We were not able to gain access to your account. Try starting over.“

This problem can be resolved only in custom wordpress installations i.e. you have your own domain on which you have installed wordpress (downloaded from http://www.wordpress.org/).

After login through FTP (Example FTP client is filezilla) to your web hosting provider, locate the folder where you have installed wordpress. In my case, I have installed it in a folder called “blog”.

Locate the folder “wp-admin”. Inside wp-admin, select a folder called “import”. Open the “import” folder. There’s a file called “blogger.php”. Download the file to your computer. Open the file in any of the popular text editors and go to line number 87. It looks like the first screenshot.

[Click the image for a bigger screenshot]

Line number 87 is highlighted in blue. Change “www2.blogger.com” to “www.blogger.com” (Refer to screenshot below). Save the file and upload it to the same folder from where you downloaded it.

[Click the image for a bigger screenshot]

Have fun! 🙂